Angus Plus Wilt Equals Mac Plus Boze
by EachPeach83
Summary: Can you change your life if you change your name?


_Author's Note:_ _None of_ MacGyver _'s characters are mine; I intend no copyright infringement. This story is solely for entertainment of myself as the writer and (I hope) you as the reader._

 _A pre-series story._

oOo

Angus climbed slowly up the rope ladder to the Lab tree house. As his head poked into the reassuringly familiar hidden space, he realized he wasn't alone: Wilt regarded him from his perch by the window. "Hey," his friend said in his usual laconic greeting.

So, no privacy this time. But having Wilt's company was the next best thing: he'd understand if Angus didn't feel like talking, or they'd talk around the problem until Angus could let himself forget it, or maybe they'd even talk about it. That was the good thing about Wilt: each of the alternatives was okay.

Angus carefully hoisted himself the rest of the way in. "Hey," he answered, matching Wilt's brevity. He kept his head ducked, aware of how he'd shot up this past year, adding three inches to his height, and of how the tree house roof that had fit fine when he and Bozer were younger and smaller now was too low. Wilt still fit: he was growing, but not at the rate Angus had. Angus thought he might like his height once he'd figured out how to manage legs and arms that were so long. At least his grandfather said he would learn how. At the moment Angus felt like the most awkward giraffe ever born.

Well, figuring out how to raise the roof without bringing down the rest of the Lab should be an entertaining project.

Wilt was studying him, and Angus kept his face turned slightly away so he wouldn't have to meet his best friend's inquiring gaze. "Did you get hold of the ammonia?" Angus asked, hoping to deflect the probing that such scrutiny usually preceded.

"Yeah, my mom bought it for me on her last trip to the grocery store," Wilt answered, waving his hand vaguely toward the bench they had built to hold the supplies for their experiments. He didn't take his gaze off Angus, though. "So, who was it this time? Donny Sandoz again, I bet."

"And his two current henchmen," Angus answered with a sigh.

Wilt didn't ask what they'd done, and Angus was grateful. Reliving the abject humiliation of being slammed against the schoolyard fence and threatened wasn't something he wanted to do, even with his best friend. And Donny's casual cruelties were pretty much variations on a theme: he didn't have the imagination to come up with anything inventive. So knowing Donny, Wilt could pretty much fill in the story that Angus wasn't telling him. It didn't look to either of them like sophomore year of high school, which was starting in a couple of days, was going to be any improvement on freshman year.

"Got us some Cokes," Wilt said, changing the subject. He tossed a red can to Angus, who caught it. The metal was still kind of cool but not cold, which meant that Wilt had been there a little while waiting for him. Angus decided not to try to calculate the thermodynamics of temperature and time right now, though he thought he probably could—but he was thirsty and would rather drink the Coke than measure its temperature and fit it to Wilt's after-school movements.

Angus sat down on the floor, leaning against the wall, and popped the lid, taking a long swig of the sweet fizzy cola. "I hate my name," he announced with the air of someone who had made a great discovery.

Wilt rolled his eyes. "You've always hated your name," he said, getting up to sit down on the floor next to Angus. "I think that's how you introduced yourself to me: 'I'm Angus and I hate my name.'"

"I did _not_ ," Angus retorted.

"May as well have," Wilt shot back. "Besides, you can join the club. I hate mine too."

"What's wrong with Wilt? Your dad named you for one of the greatest and most famous basketball players ever. That's cool."

"That's _old_. Who remembers Wilt Chamberlain these days?"

"Well, my grandfather … oh," Angus broke off as Wilt glared at him.

"Thank you for proving _my_ point," Wilt said sarcastically. "Besides, living in California, half the people who hear it say 'Walt'—and do I look like some kind of Disney? Not to mention that it makes me sound like some sick plant to the other half who do say it right," he added gloomily.

"Better than being called 'cow' or 'hamburger,'" Angus countered, equally gloomy and bitter. "I dunno, maybe 'Angus' would be okay if I lived in Scotland or Australia, where everyone else named Angus seems to be from, but it doesn't work here in Mission City. The only cool thing about my name is that it's the same as the acronym for the Acoustically Navigated Geological Underwater Survey."

Wilt looked at him, eyebrow raised skeptically. "Do I even want to know?"

"No, it's really cool," Angus insisted. "ANGUS was a deep-towed still-camera sled operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in the 70s and 80s. It took the first pictures of the deep ocean floor, and it photographed underground geysers and hydrothermal vents and the colonies of clams and giant tube worms that live near them. It helped prove that tectonic plate theory is right by showing how seafloor spreading works!"

"Okay, that's kind of cool—in a really nerdy way," Wilt said kindly.

It was Angus's turn to roll his eyes, then he cut them sideways at his friend. "They used the ANGUS to explore the _Titanic_ 's debris field on the ocean floor," he added slyly.

"The _Titanic_? You mean THE _Titanic_?" Wilt's voice hit high soprano in his excitement. As Angus nodded and grinned in affirmation, Wilt shook his head. "Why do you do that? Bury the most interesting part of the story under all that nerd? Why not start with the coolest part? I mean, you're talking about THE _TITANIC_!"

"You'd never listen to the rest if I started there," Angus answered with a shrug. "And the science part is the important part in the long run."

"No way—you will never get me to believe that pictures of clams are more important than the freaking _Titanic_ ," Wilt said with some heat.

"Giant tube worms?" Angus asked. "They can get between seven and eight feet long. You have to admit that's cool."

"No, I have to say that's something from a nightmare. And I'll do my best to forget it, thank you very much!"

Angus just raised his brows and shrugged in return. Wilt was more than happy to play around with their experiments in the Lab, but he never had the underlying passion for science that always drove Angus himself, wanting to find out the hows and whys underlying any phenomenon they encountered.

Still, Wilt was the closest Angus had to a kindred spirit his own age. He might tease Angus about his enthusiasms, but it was always gently and just in fun, never with a mean edge—unlike so many of their classmates. Plus his parents' warm welcome of their son's best friend had long helped ease the family loneliness Angus felt. The Bozers knew what loss felt like—their son Josh was remembered with great love and enormous grief—but rather than freezing them up, that loss had opened them into taking in Angus when Wilt brought him home: a motherless kid with a father who seemed only occasionally available for him and who had eventually disappeared altogether. Angus had always felt happy in their house, which had come to seem more like a home than his own much of the time. After his father left, he'd often felt the need to escape his own house, where his grandfather slept in what had once been a guest bedroom and his father's bedroom—which had once belonged to both his parents—stood silent and empty, untouched except for occasional dusting since Angus's tenth birthday.

Angus shied away from that line of thought, his usual strategy for dealing with that deeply centered pain. Instead, he returned to the more immediate problem of his terrible name. He couldn't help wondering why his parents had saddled him with it, but since they weren't around to ask, much less fix it—his hand curled into a fist—well, he'd have to fix it himself.

Like so many other things.

"So since we both hate our names, we need new names," he announced, getting back to the important point.

Wilt regarded him skeptically. "Like what? And just how are we going to get other people to call us by different names? Especially, like, my parents? And your grandfather?"

"Families are probably a lost cause. We'll be Angus and Wilt forever to them. I was thinking for school."

"So how're we going to get someone like Donny Sandoz to change what he calls us? Especially given that he usually likes to use words that I wouldn't repeat to my mama? You can make that dude do whatever he wants to do."

"Well, I guess that depends on the names we choose," Angus started.

"I got it!" Wilt interrupted. "We can be Iron Fist and Power Man! Or Luke Cage and Danny Rand! Or I could be Falcon and you could be . . . mmm, not sure anyone would buy you as Captain America."

"Don't I wish. No, I don't think calling ourselves superhero names is going to make anyone see either of us as less nerdy than they already do," Angus said drily.

"Nah, I guess not. So what do we do then?"

"Well, I hate my first name . . . but my last name is okay. How do you feel about your last name?"

"I like it fine. So you want us to go by our last names?"

"I'd rather be MacGyver than Angus, that's for sure. How about you, 'Bozer'?"

"Bozer and MacGyver," his friend said, trying it out. "We're going to sound like we've been brainwashed by the gym teachers and coaches."

"That's why this will work. We're just embracing what's already there." He paused for a moment. "You can call me Mac, for short. And you can be Boze—if you like it," he suggested.

His friend frowned. "I don't think I'm going to let just anyone call me that—but I'll let you do it. That's how people can tell if they're my real friends, if I let them use the short version. Yeah. I like this."

"I think I'd rather everyone called me Mac. Just to erase 'Angus' forever."

"Well, I promise to call you Mac—M-A-C or M-A-C-K?" Bozer asked.

"M-A-C," Mac answered. "There's no K in my last name; I don't need it in my nickname. That'd just be confusing."

"So how are we going to get everyone to switch?" Bozer asked.

"We start by always calling each other, and referring to each other, as Mac and Bozer. We ask our other friends—or at least the people who like us, to use those names. When our teachers take roll the first day of classes this week, we tell them that's what we want to be called. Gradually, it'll build up. It'll take a while, but I think it'll work. I hope so, anyway."

"All right, you got it, _Mac_. Let's drink to Mac and Bozer: best buds for life." Bozer held up his lukewarm Coke can.

"Amen to that," Mac answered, raising his own warm can and clinking it against Bozer's in a toast. "Names we can live with!"

 _Fin_


End file.
